TL;DR: Headway is a mobile app that condenses fiction and non-fiction books into quick summaries, and it's only $70 for life.

There just isn't enough time in the day to sit down for hours at a time and read a book, only to find out you didn't even get anything out of it. — Read the rest

The post A popular platform is making it easier to read in your spare time, and it's only $70 for life appeared first on Boing Boing.

Long before Edison, a working light source turned up by accident. In 1675, the French astronomer Jean Picard noticed that the mercury in his barometer glowed as he carried it across a dark room. The faint light, later called "barometric light," drew the interest of some of the era's biggest scientific names before the trick faded into obscurity. — Read the rest

The post The glowing light bulb discovered by accident in 1675 appeared first on Boing Boing.

When you open a credit card, you probably expect your home address expecting it to stay with your bank. According to 404 Media, it doesn't — the address travels through a chain of data brokers and ends up with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which can search it without a warrant. — Read the rest

The post Open a credit card, and ICE learns where you live appeared first on Boing Boing.

RAF pilots flying over the Middle East in the 1920s kept seeing huge shapes laid out on the ground that nobody walking across them had noticed: two long stone walls converging into an enclosure, with a tail. Group Captain Lionel Rees said they looked like toy kites, and the name stuck. — Read the rest

The post RAF pilots spotted 6,000 stone traps invisible from the ground appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Darvaza gas crater in Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert — 60 to 70 meters across, 30 meters deep, and burning since 1971 — earned the nickname "Door to Hell" thanks to its hundreds of natural gas fires covering its floor and rim, visible for miles across the desert night. — Read the rest

The post Turkmenistan's "Gates of Hell" crater is finally going out after 54 years appeared first on Boing Boing.

Michael Ham, retired in British Columbia, listed his walking poles in the Cool Tools newsletter What's in my NOW? and he wants you to know they are nothing like trekking poles. You hold a trekking pole out in front with a bent arm, and they mostly help you keep your balance on a steep climb. — Read the rest

The post Why walking poles held behind you burn 20% more calories appeared first on Boing Boing.

Some people would happily wreck your $1,000 suit to mop up a spill, because the small amount of utility it beats the hurt it causes you. Writing on the blog Atoms vs Bits, Uri uses that as the bottom of a scale — how much weight a person gives your wellbeing next to their own.  — Read the rest

The post The person who'd use your $1,000 suit as a floor rag appeared first on Boing Boing.

Neal Stephenson writes his novels the way people did in 1850. The science-fiction author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and the thousand-page Baroque Cycle has composed nearly every book since about 2001 with a fountain pen on paper. On his Substack, Graphomane, he says the handwritten manuscript for The Baroque Cycle stood 42 inches high and was displayed at the Science Fiction museum in Seattle. — Read the rest

The post Neal Stephenson's guide to writing books with a fountain pen appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Uncle Sam's Army handed millions of employees "unlimited" AI tokens, urged them to use more, and was shocked when they did.

Reportedly, the Big Green Machine bought an annual package containing 100 million tokens and encouraged workers to "lean into" generative AI, even sending out reminders to use the service. — Read the rest

The post U.S. Army finds out unlimited isn't appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Orange Menace offered a fallen service member's grieving family a ride on his special Air Force One, and proudly reported their response: "They said wow." What Trump remembers about a family in mourning is that they like his plane.

There is no human tragedy so large that Trump cannot crawl inside it and find a flattering anecdote about himself. — Read the rest

The post Grandpa Pudding Brains tells grieving parents they can ride on his cool plane appeared first on Boing Boing.

Elon Musk, whose promises traditionally arrive years late or not at all, says Grok Imagine will make a full-length, "historically accurate" adaptation of The Odyssey before Christmas 2026. At last, a meticulously researched Scylla and Charybdis.

Musk announced the project after complaining that Nolan had "desecrated Homer" with his casting choices. — Read the rest

The post Elon Musk promises you a historically accurate Cyclops appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: For $59.99 (reg. $250), Pok Pok gives your family lifetime access to an award-winning educational app designed to make screen time calmer, more creative, and a lot less chaotic.

Parents spend a surprising amount of time trying to answer one question: Am I failing at this screen time thing? — Read the rest

The post This is the $60 Montessori-inspired kids' app that won't leave you feeling guilty afterward appeared first on Boing Boing.

Measles is having its best year in America since 1991, which is excellent news for measles and a little embarrassing for everyone else.

Most of the cases are among unvaccinated people, and health officials continue to warn the surge could cost the United States its measles-elimination status. — Read the rest

The post The anti-vax movement keeps setting records nobody wanted appeared first on Boing Boing.

On his way to receive four fallen service members at Dover, the President of the United States claimed the dead had strongly endorsed the Iran policy that sent them there.

Nothing is as ghoulish as Grandpa Pudding Brains using dead US service people as props in his illegal war. — Read the rest

The post Trump makes the dead endorse his war appeared first on Boing Boing.

Liminal spaces are so hot right now, guys. I hope you're ready for the surge of movies about being trapped in weird, unexplainable places we're going to see in the next few years now that Backrooms is a proven money maker. — Read the rest

The post It Ends is a horror movie about a road that ironically doesn't do that appeared first on Boing Boing.

If you've spent any time wandering the borderlands where technognosis, occulture, and the weirdosphere collide, you already know Erik Davis — a scholar of the weird who has spent decades mapping the multidimensional margins of human consciousness. In the latest installment of his always-inspiring Burning Shore newsletter, Erik shares some welcome news: the entire catalogue of his Expanding Mind podcast, after vanishing from the web without warning, is back and now safely enshrined on YouTube, ready to stream. — Read the rest

The post A decade of cult podcast episodes vanished, then reappeared online appeared first on Boing Boing.

A program rumored to launch as soon as next week will allow customers to lease Apple hardware, but financing companies can lock down those devices for missed payments.

The Apple Upgrade program will provide 12- to 36-month leases on iPhones, iPads, and iMacs, but may also mean giving up control of your device. — Read the rest

The post Apple's upcoming leasing program may come with a big caveat appeared first on Boing Boing.

I just discovered, through Frank Santopadre's podcast Fun for All Ages, the radio and television universe of artist Rachel Lichtman's imagined 1960s/1970s town of Golden Sands.

It's a surreal town stuck in a mid-century far out brown-and-orange aesthetic. Lichtman creates parody television commercials, and print and radio ads from the town of Golden Sands, as well as opening credit theme song videos from the town's television station, Programme 4. — Read the rest

The post Enter Rachel Lichtman's groovy, shag-carpeted world of Golden Sands appeared first on Boing Boing.

Tom the Dancing Bug: Follow Little Donald Trump's Odyssey

-Please join the team that makes it possible for your friendly neighborhood comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug to exist in this hostile Trumpverse! JOIN US IN THE INNER HIVE, and be the first kid on your block to get each week's Tom the Dancing Bug comic – before it's published anywhere, plus lots of other stuff. — Read the rest

The post Tom the Dancing Bug: Follow Little Donald Trump's Odyssey appeared first on Boing Boing.

Budget carrier EasyJet sent a Liverpool-bound flight back to Tenerife after a fight broke out among the 186 passengers aboard on Tuesday evening. "About 10" people were reportedly involved in the brawl, half an hour after takeoff, leading the captain to turn flight EZY3352 around and request that police meet them after landing at Tenerife South airport. — Read the rest

The post 10-person passenger brawl sends EasyJet flight back to airport appeared first on Boing Boing.

Worse on Purpose is a website about the decline in product quality and the forces driving it, ranging from mundane cost-cutting to enshittification. Private equity is a regular theme, but corporations of every kind are at it, and the site offers "autopsies" of notable offenders and categories. — Read the rest

The post Products are getting worse on purpose appeared first on Boing Boing.

At 5:10 p.m. on Saturday 26 November 1977, viewers in parts of southern England watching an ITN news summary heard the audio mutate into a deep buzz. A distorted voice took over, introducing itself as Vrillon, a representative of the Ashtar Galactic Command, and telling humanity that it had a short time left to put down its weapons and learn to live in peace. — Read the rest

The post In 1977, a voice claiming to be an alien took over British TV for four minutes appeared first on Boing Boing.

In 2014, a talking doll named My Friend Cayla was voted Innovative Toy of the Year. Three years later the German government was telling parents to destroy it. Cayla listened to a child through a hidden microphone, beamed the audio over Bluetooth to a phone app, searched the internet for an answer, and spoke back after about a one-second delay. — Read the rest

The post Germany told parents to destroy this talking doll appeared first on Boing Boing.

AI companies are facing a data problem of their own making: the open web is clogged with AI-generated text, and training new models on that sludge invites "model collapse," where machines degrade by eating their own output. One company is filling the need for human-written content by buying old printed books in bulk. — Read the rest

The post AI companies are buying up old books to escape their own AI slop appeared first on Boing Boing.

Designer and writer Matt Webb has a bone to pick with the movie ratings board. Ferris Bueller's Day Off carries a PG-13 for cursing and kissing, but Frozen 2 — where a tidal wave nearly levels an entire kingdom — sailed through with a PG. — Read the rest

The post Frozen 2 should be rated R, a writer argues with data appeared first on Boing Boing.

On the evening of October 15, 1991, the University of Utah's Fly's Eye detector at Dugway Proving Ground recorded a single subatomic particle arriving from space with an energy of about 3.2×10²⁰ electronvolts — an atomic nucleus carrying the kinetic energy of a baseball traveling 100 kilometers per hour. — Read the rest

The post A single atomic nucleus hit Utah with the force of a pitched baseball appeared first on Boing Boing.

TL;DR: Stop fearing your PDFs! Easily edit, convert, annotate, and master your PDFs with this license to PDF Agile Premium for Windows and Mac for just $39.99 (Reg. $119).

We've all been there: staring down the barrel of a PDF, needing to do more with it than our OS allows. — Read the rest

The post PDFs fill you with dread? Save yourself the stress with a PDF reader appeared first on Boing Boing.

FreeInk is an open-source ecosystem for e-ink readers, aiming to replace locked-down software and walled gardens with a stack that includes everything from firmware to fonts and free file formats. There's even reference hardware and a manifesto.

From the rendering engine to the charging circuit, every layer is documented and open.

— Read the rest

The post Open-source firmware and software for e-readers appeared first on Boing Boing.

The Castle Map is an interactive atlas of the world's greatest strongholds, featuring (at press time) 1,706 castles, 543 fortresses, 760 palaces and 682 ruins. They are further filterable by "fame ranking," with 100 in the top category, and by their date of construction (going back to ~3000 BC's Aniba fortified village.) — Read the rest

The post Interactive map of the world's castles, fortresses, palaces and ruins appeared first on Boing Boing.

The World Wide Web address turns 41 this year. DNS.pizza has analyzed 85,879 domains with verified registration dates and ranked the oldest active domains. 

The DNS "opened for business in 1985," the site notes: nordu.net, a Nordic research network, was created on January 1, and symbolics.com — Read the rest

The post A tour of the oldest domains still on the internet appeared first on Boing Boing.